Anybody still playing M0

[GypsyComet]

There is no reason to believe there was a massive die back on former Imperial worlds just because there is no interstellar trade. Pocket empires would have sprung up, worlds could still maintain some contact via STL methods - the way the Vilani spread into space in the first place.

Politics became local, to paraphrase a common thought.

Because the first two centuries or so after the declared beginning were a period of slow but recognized withdrawal, pocket empires would certainly have remained behind. Small cultural zones around strong worlds who dared to defy the coming darkness.

I think there was retreat and retrenching, as many of the little specialized colonies and outposts saw the writing on the wall and picked up stakes for the nearest High Population center. The Solomani had inundated the former First Imperium with settlers who were not at all picky, so there were a lot of systems with young settlements two centuries later. How those would have been treated by the majority Vilani old Hi Pops as the retreat began would have run the gamut, and been a precursor to the real darkness.

 

[Baroun Tardis]

Not me, I run a pre interstellar war period, but do use T4 and FF&S 2 custom designs for all Terran equipmemt. Imperial designs get whatever cannon sourses I can find, and the imperials get ONE innovation for the entire period: Fighters.
With this campaign the Terrans start out at TL 9 (progressing rapidly) and the imperials at TL 11 (enforced stagnation).
At TL 9 starship operations are, ahem, somewhat challenging. Just getting to orbit takes 6 hours with an antigrav unit, or 20 minutes with a strap on million ton liquid fuelled rocket booster. once in orbit you can fire up your expermental Fusion Rocket or your Daedaelus drive or Bussard ram to get to 100d for jump.

So, SpaceX is still in business then?
I do like the mental image of this setting, with that bittersweet mounting of the starship on the booster, and the knowledge that this is the last time that hull will touch the "Green Hills of Earth" , but be forever in the void between worlds.
And the pagentry of the big chemical booster shoving it out to sea in a writ-large version of the old launching of a sailing ship down the ramp into the ocean.

 

[Condottiere]

I like to think RyanAerospace would still be in business.

Essentially, the break up of the Roman Empire made politics local, but the immediate successor states had ambitions for reunification, though I'm going to say geography got in the way, compared to the history of the Middle Kingdom.

 

[Grav_Moped]

Not me, I run a pre interstellar war period, but do use T4 and FF&S 2 custom designs for all Terran equipmemt. Imperial designs get whatever cannon sourses I can find, and the imperials get ONE innovation for the entire period: Fighters.
With this campaign the Terrans start out at TL 9 (progressing rapidly) and the imperials at TL 11 (enforced stagnation).
At TL 9 starship operations are, ahem, somewhat challenging. Just getting to orbit takes 6 hours with an antigrav unit, or 20 minutes with a strap on million ton liquid fuelled rocket booster. once in orbit you can fire up your expermental Fusion Rocket or your Daedaelus drive or Bussard ram to get to 100d for jump.

Years late, but since it's been revived:

A Bussard Ramjet isn't going to get anywhere near operational speed before reaching the 100D limit. But it reminded me of something...

I ran across something in the Trav Wiki about a jump-capable starship with a Bussard Ramjet drive. It cruised at 0.3c or so to gather hydrogen with the scoop and jumped when it had sufficient fuel. Seemed like a pretty nifty idea.

The retconned Collector Drive (that no longer needs to be near a star to work) made that idea moot, and the gravity-well-limited nerf to maneuver drives made it unworkable (not enough room inside the gravity well for shuttlecraft to slow from frac-c velocity to land at a world, do their trading or whatever, then catch up with the ship again).

Bonus points: since grav drives don't work in this application, have them use an Orion Drive (pulsed nuclear detonation) instead. Then have them come out into the nuke-free-zone of the Imperium and see what happens...

It'd make a nice Big Dumb Object to build a scenario around.

 

[Timerover51]

I have been looking at it a bit for my Tech Level 12 or so Out Rim sector.

 

[ManOfGrey]

Like it says on the can, is anybody still running games set in M0 (regardless of ruleset)?

It's hard to believe it's been eleven years since AndreaV asked this question.

And, for me, it's even harder to believe its been six years since I replied with the ideas I had in mind for a campaign.

But, to answer your question, AndreaV, my weekly D&D group is finally taking a break from swords & sorcery, and is trying out T4 for the first time. I certainly hope they come to enjoy Traveller as much as I.

If anyone's interested, I am going to try to chronicle their adventures. I hope to capture the essence of what they do, and what they encounter, to remember what Traveller looks like when you see it for the first time.

T4 -- Into the Unknown.

“We now stand upon the beginning of a new dawn. For eight centuries, since the collapse of the Rule of Man, our galaxy has suffered through a dark age as we lost contact with all of the tribes of Humaniti. But now our nineteen worlds have joined together in order to emerge from this Long...

travellerrpg.com

 

[warwizard]

Years late, but since it's been revived:

A Bussard Ramjet isn't going to get anywhere near operational speed before reaching the 100D limit. But it reminded me of something...

I ran across something in the Trav Wiki about a jump-capable starship with a Bussard Ramjet drive. It cruised at 0.3c or so to gather hydrogen with the scoop and jumped when it had sufficient fuel. Seemed like a pretty nifty idea.

The retconned Collector Drive (that no longer needs to be near a star to work) made that idea moot, and the gravity-well-limited nerf to maneuver drives made it unworkable (not enough room inside the gravity well for shuttlecraft to slow from frac-c velocity to land at a world, do their trading or whatever, then catch up with the ship again).

Bonus points: since grav drives don't work in this application, have them use an Orion Drive (pulsed nuclear detonation) instead. Then have them come out into the nuke-free-zone of the Imperium and see what happens...
nearly emptynearly empty
It'd make a nice Big Dumb Object to build a scenario around.

Well as the ship is in a close orbit of a planet with a magnetic field I would say that there would be the ability to derive some level of thrust from the stellar wind, assumming you had a reserve Liquid H2 tank on board you could do a slingshot maneuver around the sun gain lots of thrust, generate electrical power from the magnetohydronamic generator that is part of the bussard ram system, capture and cryogenically chill your tank full of Liquid H2, rinse and repeat at faster speeds, should not prevent you from reaching 100 dia. The core of the bussard drive is a fusion rocket after all. All you need to do is feed it H2 or D2 if it is the experimental version. Obviously a Bussard ram drive can be used as a fusion rocket given internal H2 tankage. (Rule glitch here (FF&S 2) TL9 gives only experimental Fusion rockets, the Bussard ram is available at TL9 but it has as it's basis a fusion rocket. My proposal is either treat the TL9 Bussard ram as having an experimental fusion rocket, and delaying the version with the Fusion Rocket till TL10, or move the experimental fusion rocket to TL8.) P.S. I have moved to rural Alaska all my traveller materials are in storage, I estimate two years before I have my log cabin (4800 sq ft) built so I can unpack into my gaming room.

 

[Jame]

I Luke the idea of the setting, although I haven't read the T4 books or PDFs too closely.
If I ever use the setting, I'm more likely to use CT or MgT for it (I have my opinion of the T4 rules but I'll leave it at that).

 

[GypsyComet]

I Luke the idea of the setting, although I haven't read the T4 books or PDFs too closely.

Milieu Zero Campaign is generally the one stop shop for setting feel. Age of expansion via economic means when possible, and war when necessary.

 

[atpollard]

Personally, I like the Small Imperium of M:0 and there is no reason why we should be slaves to the timeline there is lots of space (pardon the pun) to alter events. What if Artemeus was more than what he seemed - he could have been a Vilani spy befriended Cleon with the dreams of resurrecting the First Imperium. I would be interested in using MgT Dynasty to rebuild M:0 thus introduce more factions than Pocket Empires then gradually allow Pocket Empires to creep in with a more exploration campaign.

I agree. I LOVED "Hard Times" because of the shift from Galactic MegaImperiums to a "civilization/frontier/wilderness" paradigm (toss the Civil War and Virus that I had no use for). M0 posits the same from the opposite direction ... worlds climbing out of a hole rather than falling into a hole. That appeals to me.

 

[warwizard]

I perfer exploring worlds where 99.99% of the time your team are the first sophonts that have visited it. I rather think that the visiting of 1700 year old ruins on world after world would be a depressing excercize, and lead to a short campaign.

 

[atpollard]

I perfer exploring worlds where 99.99% of the time your team are the first sophonts that have visited it. I rather think that the visiting of 1700 year old ruins on world after world would be a depressing excercize, and lead to a short campaign.

If the Amazon jungle reclaiming once thriving Meso-American cities in less than a hundred years is any indication … IDENTIFYING a ruin from untamed wilderness after 17 centuries might prove a daunting task better suited to Archiologists than a Scout Survey team. Your question is :

What have the people and animals that survived become after 85 generations of human adaptation and two or four times as many generations of animal adaptations?

Even a 1 in a billion survival rate on earth for an extinction level event leaves 7 or 8 people behind … say 2 breeding couples. Doubling population every generation for 85 generations …
The survey team finds up to POP 25 people living on the world and adapted to the new environment. Perhaps as a new human sub-species.

 

[casquilho]

If the Amazon jungle reclaiming once thriving Meso-American cities in less than a hundred years is any indication … IDENTIFYING a ruin from untamed wilderness after 17 centuries might prove a daunting task better suited to Archiologists than a Scout Survey team. Your question is :

What have the people and animals that survived become after 85 generations of human adaptation and two or four times as many generations of animal adaptations?

Even a 1 in a billion survival rate on earth for an extinction level event leaves 7 or 8 people behind … say 2 breeding couples. Doubling population every generation for 85 generations …
The survey team finds up to POP 25 people living on the world and adapted to the new environment. Perhaps as a new human sub-species.

And the issues they would have with such a small gene pool inbreeding. I wonder if they would even make it 85 generations.

 

[atpollard]

And the issues they would have with such a small gene pool inbreeding. I wonder if they would even make it 85 generations.

I would think that natural selection would resolve most of the issues so that if the population doubled every 20 years in reproductive births, but population growth (eliminating bad mutations) only doubled every 100 years, that is still a population of 2^17 when you make contact.

1 in a billion was a dramatically low survival rate to begin with, so the starting gene pool would likely be larger.

It also discounts the possibility that the first few generations might have the technology to correct the gene pool and avoid any issues. (Rome didn’t fall in a day, either).

 

[TamsinP]

If the Amazon jungle reclaiming once thriving Meso-American cities in less than a hundred years is any indication … IDENTIFYING a ruin from untamed wilderness after 17 centuries might prove a daunting task better suited to Archiologists than a Scout Survey team. Your question is :

I seem to recall that a couple of years ago a previously unknown city in central/south America was found using LIDAR from a satellite. That suggests that a scout ship using LIDAR to map a world's surface would be able to identify the location and extent of any surface ruins, maybe even to map them. Using densitometers it might be able to locate and map subsurface structures.

 

[kilemall]

I seem to recall that a couple of years ago a previously unknown city in central/south America was found using LIDAR from a satellite. That suggests that a scout ship using LIDAR to map a world's surface would be able to identify the location and extent of any surface ruins, maybe even to map them. Using densitometers it might be able to locate and map subsurface structures.

Radar can be ground penetration and map underground as well.

 

[whartung]

That suggests that a scout ship using LIDAR to map a world's surface would be able to identify the location and extent of any surface ruins, maybe even to map them. Using densitometers it might be able to locate and map subsurface structures.

Indeed but you need a suspicion to perform the scan in the area in the first place.

 

[whartung]

Radar can be ground penetration and map underground as well.

Every GPR image I've seen has been pretty awful. More blobs of "maybe something here" vs anything I'd call a "map". And it seems a lot of those anomalies are no shows.

 

[Condottiere]

Foundations, straight lines, dry riverbeds, and excavated cavities tend to be clues.

 

[kilemall]

Foundations, straight lines, dry riverbeds, and excavated cavities tend to be clues.

Hmm how about if those aren’t stylized renditions but actual limbs and proportions of alien races?